Kit of Greenacre Farm eBook

Miss Peabody smiled and nodded, looking from one young
face to the other. Never before had youth sat
lunching at that table with her and her brother in
quite such a radiant guise. The Dean usually took
his noontide meal in absolute silence when they were
alone together, as he held that desultory conversation
disturbed his train of thought. But since Kit’s
coming, it had been impossible to check her flow of
talk, until now the Dean actually missed it if she
happened to be absent.

CHAPTER XVIII

STANLEY APOLOGIZES

After lunch they all went into the library to look
over the Dean’s newly arrived treasures.

“Well, for pity’s sakes,” exclaimed
Kit, as she stood before the plain, squat, terra-cotta
urn, “is that the royal urn? I expected
to see something enormous, like everything else that
is wonderful and ancient in Egypt.”

“Dear child,” the Dean responded, happily,
as he bent down to trace the curious, cuneiform markings
which circled the urn. “This antedates the
time of the Captivity and Moses. I cannot tell
positively, until I have opened it and deciphered
what I can of the papyrus rolls within. If it
should go back to Moses, it will be wonderful.
I cannot believe that it is contemporary with Nineveh.
Daphne, you can recall how overjoyed I was when we
unearthed that library of precious clay under the Nineveh
mounds years ago. Think of reading something
which was written by living man several thousand years
before that.”

“What fun it must have been,” Billie remarked.
“If you wanted to write anything in those days,
you just picked up a handful of mud and made a little
brick out of it, and wrote away with a stick, didn’t
you?”

“Stylus, my boy, stylus,” corrected the
Dean, absently. “Yes, I doubt not but what
it did away with much of our modern detail.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Kit, suddenly, “I
left all the notes on Semele in the library.
I’m awfully sorry, Uncle Cassius, but when I
saw Billy standing there unexpectedly, I just forgot
everything. We can walk up there this afternoon
and get them. Is the statue very beautiful?”

“Perfect, perfect,” murmured the Dean,
as he still hung over the urn abstractedly. “It’s
just behind you, my dear.”

Kit turned, expecting to face one of the usual blandly
smiling Egyptian colossi, even in miniature, with
a few wings scattered over it here and there.
But instead, there stood in the center of the Dean’s
library table a strangely attenuated figure about
three feet high. As Billie said afterwards, it
appeared to be dancing the Grasshopper’s Nocturnal
Rhapsody. It had a head that was a cross between
an intelligent antelope and a rather toploftical baby
rat. Its arms were extended at sharp angles,
and seemed to be pointing in arch accusation at one.
Wings spread fanwise from the shoulders, and its feet
were like the feet of a griffin.